


From the Wreckage

by lucymonster



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: M/M, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-15 11:17:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16061990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/pseuds/lucymonster
Summary: Ren's quiet when they bring him on board, hands locked in durasteel binders and a dozen blasters pointed at his head. He doesn't try to escape. Doesn't bargain, doesn't threaten. Doesn't even make eye contact.‘I’ll help you,’ says Finn, and he means it more than he can explain.





	From the Wreckage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Artemis1000](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis1000/gifts).



Rey emerges from the brig with a face like murder. 'I’m done,' she says, as she storms past Finn on the way to her cabin. 'He’s not going to cooperate, and it’s not worth my time trying to make him. Let’s just lock the cage and throw away the key.'

She doesn’t really mean it. She’ll be back before long – she has to be, because even just a few days ago, not a soul in the Resistance would have dreamed they’d have a chance to interrogate the Supreme Leader of the First Order. The intel he could give them if he cracks is worth lifetimes of frustration.

But this is how things are between Rey and Kylo Ren. They hate each other’s guts, they shout, they scream, they swear they’re going to kill each other – and then the next time they come back for more. It’s a cycle that Finn has spent a lot of time trying and failing to understand.

Something strange happened today. In the heat of battle, with the whole Resistance locked in his ship’s sights, Ren hesitated, and that hesitation blew up his defenses like a neutron star collision. He was weirdly quiet when they brought him on board, hands locked in durasteel binders and a dozen blasters pointed at his head. Didn’t try to escape. Didn’t bargain, didn’t threaten. Didn’t even make eye contact. According to the security holo in the monitoring bay, he’s sitting quietly in his cell with his blank gaze fixed on the wall in front of him.

Finn and his scars and the whole damn galaxy would be better off if Ren were dead. But sitting there with his hair hanging in his eyes, greasy with adrenaline and battle sweat, he doesn’t look like the blazing doomsday threat that has haunted Finn’s dreams since the night they faced each other on Starkiller. He looks small. Tired. Stretched thin around the hard mass of cancerous ambition that has long since outgrown his all-too-human body. Finn doesn’t need the Force to know how that situation ends.

There’s only so far you can stretch anything before it breaks. And if Ren’s not there yet, he can’t be all that far.

* * *

The air below deck tastes musty and stale. Harsh, bright lights shine down from overhead, illuminating every corner of the brig so that nothing can hide from the security footage. There’s a crackling energy field around the cell, layered invisibly over the bars to stop Ren from using the Force to blast his way out and wreak havoc on the ship.

If Ren has any escape plans for the near future, he’s done well setting up a false sense of security. There’s no movement in the cell except the gentle rise and fall of his chest. He doesn’t even look up when Finn approaches.

Looking at him now, it’s hard to accept that _this_ is the man who struck fear and awe into the hearts of several million First Order soldiers for all those years. This is the man whose name to this day makes Finn’s gut clench and his scarred spine twinge. Whose apparent charm took Rey to the very brink of a decision that Poe called ‘straight-up fucking treason, no offense’, when the story came out about what happened on the _Supremacy_.

(‘Started any mutinies lately?’ Rey had shot back, firing up at once. ‘I went because I felt there was still light in Kylo Ren. I believed he could turn.’ Finn, reluctant to offer his perspective, had stayed out of the ensuing argument.)

All the years they’ve fought. All the losses they’ve sustained. All the terrible choices they’ve made to get here. Ren’s narcissistic rage has brought the whole damn galaxy to its knees, and now he looks like he’s a few stern words away from bursting into tears.

It wouldn’t be the first time Finn has seen him cry. But he didn’t come here to bring that up, and it’s unlikely Ren remembers at this point. Stormtroopers aren’t designed to be memorable.

'Feeling sorry for yourself?' he asks. It’s not a great opener, but it makes Ren look up.

His face hardens almost immediately. 'I’m feeling sorry for you, traitor. Who’d you piss off to get stuck on guard duty?'

'Oh, I’m just passing by. This cage thing’s a good look for you.'

'Enjoy it while it lasts,' says Ren.

They lapse into silence. Finn realises a bit too late that Ren’s comment was an opening – a hint that he has some kind of escape plan, one that a quicker person could have baited him into bragging about. This is probably why no one’s asked Finn to help with the interrogation.

Oh well. It’s not his job to work Ren over for strategic intel. He came down here for another reason. 'Why didn’t you kill us?'

A cool glance. A pointed, arrogant pause before he answers. 'There’s a lot of people I could kill but don’t. I’m merciful that way.’

'You’ve hunted us all across the galaxy, but when you finally got your chance, you didn’t take the shot. I’m asking why.'

Ren says nothing.

‘Rey would still help you, you know,' Finn says.

Still nothing.

There’s no question in Finn’s mind that he’s right. Ever since that day on Crait, Rey’s anger has been just a little too keen, a little too personal. She tries so hard to play the rebel badass, but there’s a softness in her heart that loss and betrayal and years of desperate subsistence on Jakku have failed to temper out. She doesn’t know how to give up on people. Finn’s not sure she even knows what giving up really means.

The thought pisses him off so much. 'Hell, everyone and their droid wants to help you. Your dad died trying, and your mom damn near followed him. Luke Skywalker went into exile for years because he was so ashamed of what happened between you. Rey dropped everything and ran to your side the last time she thought you might be wavering, and she’d do it again if you could find it somewhere inside yourself to string together a half-assed apology. So what gives, Ren? Why can’t you do it?'

'You wouldn’t understand,' says Ren, in a proud tone that’s almost comically at odds with his current less-than-lordly predicament. 'A traitor like you has no idea what loyalty looks like.'

'You’re right,' says Finn. 'I’m way out of my depth with this whole loyalty thing. But since you’ve got nothing else to do, maybe you can talk me through it. Where do you want to start – the part where you stole the throne by killing your own master, or the part where you took your finger off the trigger on a whim and refused to kill public enemy number one?'

'Spare me,' says Ren, and turns his head away with a sneer. But Finn doesn’t miss the flicker in his eyes before his hair falls over them like a curtain. It’s not confidence, that look. It’s not conviction. It’s bitter, seething hatred – and it isn’t directed at Finn.

* * *

The first time Finn saw Ren cry was a cold, dark, wintery day. All days on Starkiller were cold and dark and wintery, so he didn’t think much about the scene-setting drama of it. The project was in its early stages. The Order hadn’t yet made a few key Outer Rim conquests that would fill their coffers past capacity. Funding was tight, and no one was entirely sure the experimental superweapon would even work.

The boiler room of Camp Three Zeta was as cold as the rest of base, never mind the maze of copper pipes pumping heated water through the guts of the building to the kitchen and sanitation bays. The lights were flickering. A couple of lumen globes needed replacing.

Finn was pushing his mop across the floor, slopping sudsy water around and looking forward to the movie night his CO had organised for that evening. The First Order never was a great centre of the arts, and ‘movie night’ usually meant a couple of hours sitting on hard chairs in front of whatever heavily doctored footage the propaganda bureau had decided to release. But there would be snacks on top of their usual rations, and maybe some cool shots of elite TIE pilots in action or the latest output from armory R&D.

By all rights he should have been alone down there – the boiler room wasn’t exactly a hub of strategic activity. But as he moved towards the back of the room he heard shallow breathing and a choked, ragged little sound, and when he peered around a pipe he saw something he wouldn’t have expected in a million years: Kylo Ren, slumped on a storage crate in the corner of the room. His helmet was sitting beside him, discarded. His head was buried in his hands. He didn’t look up at the sound of Finn’s footsteps, too busy sobbing and shaking to notice the arrival.

Finn froze behind the cover of the pipe. Instinct told him to run away from the scary lightsaber-wielding man with the legendary temper. Training told him to keep his nose out of a senior commander’s business. But his heart – that glaring nonconformity Phasma never quite managed to beat out of him – clenched when another thin sob escaped the cage of Ren’s hands.

Since neither the crying nor the clenching seemed likely to stop, Finn slipped out to a nearby canteen station and came back with the best he could find at short notice: a thermos full of hot tea brewed from the slightly stale teabags in the crewman’s cupboard.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, his voice distant to his own ears as it filtered through the mouthpiece of his helmet.

Ren looked up, startled. His eyes were rimmed red, his pale skin was flushed around the cheeks and nose, and strands of dark hair were stuck to his tear-streaked face. There went Finn’s heart again. He’d caught glimpses of Ren once in a while, swooping bat-like around the base, always with his mask on. But underneath the chrome and carbon, the man was young – younger than he acted when he issued commands, younger than he sounded through his vocoder. Not all that much older than Finn. He looked like everyone looks when they cry. Soft. Sad. Vulnerable.

‘I’m sorry to interrupt, sir,’ Finn said, stumped for words. He hadn’t planned much beyond acquiring the tea. ‘Uh, I brought you a hot drink.’

Ren stared like he’d never seen a thermos in his life before.

To this day, Finn has no idea what the crying jag was about. He didn’t sit down and offer to talk, he didn’t pry into something that was none of his business and well above his pay grade. But he remembers the sound of those choked little sobs, and the quavering ‘thank you’ as Ren reached for the thermos with trembling hands. Finn left to give him some privacy, and when he came back later – to finish his mopping, but also to check up on the situation – Ren was gone.

* * *

He doesn’t crack. First Order ships swarm the sector in pursuit, and the whole Resistance unit is forced to ground on an uninhabited planet where a hidden bunker left over from the civil war will hopefully keep them safe and out of view. Finn and Rey and their tiny crew are cut off from the main fleet – from Leia’s wisdom and Poe’s strategic mind and the support of all their auxiliary forces. They can’t risk broadcasting for help, not when Order slicers will be scanning every known frequency to intercept their signals.

'They might negotiate for him,' Rey says, as she watches the radar in a control room that makes Crait look modern by comparison. 'We fly to the edge of the sector, then drop him right before jumping to lightspeed.'

And get all of half a parsec away before the Order’s active tracking system catches right back up to them. 'Leia can guess where we are,' says Finn. 'She knows about this place, she’ll figure out what’s happened and find a way to extract us.'

'I really wasn’t planning on this when we took the mission.'

'Neither was I. It’s always the small stuff that gets us, isn’t it?' He smiles ruefully, and thumps the top of the radar screen to stop it blinking in and out. It does stop – on an out, rather than an in. 'Ugh, what a piece of junk. Poe swore this was going to be a straightforward mission. Just fly in, blow up the power plant and scarper, no mess, no fuss. Kylo Ren wasn’t supposed to factor in.'

'Well,' says Rey, lips curling in a mirthless smile. 'He’s always been good at factoring in.'

* * *

The thing is, Finn is on Rey’s side. Her real side, not the side she tries to show when her patience with Ren is running thin.

He doesn’t want to be on her side, particularly. He’d rather agree with Poe and Rose and all the others whose rage has hardened after years of watching the First Order tear their lives apart: Kylo Ren is too far gone, and who _cares_ about bringing him back to the light? Surely the Resistance isn’t so bereft of hope that they’ll cling to whatever rusty old scraps they can pull from the wreckage of Han and Leia’s long lost son.

It’s just that every time Finn thinks he’s found his balance in hatred, memory sneaks up to trip him from behind. He vividly remembers his time with the Order. Remembers the overbearing weight of those jaws biting down on him, but also the moments of peace he found in the spaces between the beast’s teeth. Life was so much simpler when he didn’t have to decide what to think or how to act. There was pain and fear, but there was also passion and excitement and friendship – the tribal fervour of a million voices shouting in unison. The exhilaration of hurtling unchecked through the most distant reaches of space.

The blazing joy of certainty, of purpose, of belonging.

The millions of human hearts locked inside that flying death trap. The loneliness. The longing. The sound of muffled sobs echoing inside a dark and empty boiler room.

On the day Finn defected, his heart hammered like a war drum in his chest. He looked around at the only life he’d ever known, and for more than just a fleeting second, he wavered. It wasn’t too late to put Pandora back in her box. To pretend he hadn’t heard the call of his conscience. He could go back to his barracks and brush off his crisis as first-battle nerves and keep his place on the winning team.

In the end, Finn made the right decision. But when Rey says Ren is conflicted, he believes her.

* * *

No one tells him to go back down to the brig. As Poe might put it, though, they also don’t tell him _not_ to go back down to the brig. It’s dinner time, by Galactic Standard – hell knows what local time this system follows – and on his way down Finn passes an orderly pushing an empty dinner cart. He wouldn’t have needed a whole cart to deliver a single meal tray, but they’ve all agreed it’s in their interests to make their operation look polished in front of Ren. Make it seem like holding prisoners is nothing out of the ordinary for them.

The orderly gives Finn a funny look, but doesn’t ask what he’s doing down here. Good. Finn’s not entirely sure he knows the answer.

Which makes it even weirder that Ren doesn’t seem at all surprised to see him. ‘You know,’ he says by way of greeting, lip curling as he inspects his meal, ‘food deprivation is against the Hosnian Conventions on the humane treatment of prisoners of war.’

Finn doesn’t point out that Ren hasn’t always been such a big fan of the Hosnian Conventions himself. ‘You’ve got your food right there,’ he says instead.

‘This isn’t food. This is bantha slop.’

‘I’ll pass on your compliments to the chef,’ says Finn, in what he hopes is a tone of dignified scorn. He pulls up a guard’s chair and sits down a couple of feet from the cage.

Ren scoops up a ladleful of soup and then pours it back into his bowl untouched. ‘What do you want, traitor?’

‘You never answered my question before,’ says Finn. ‘You never told me why you didn’t kill us when you had the chance. I want to know why.’

Another ladleful. Flecks of soup splash up the sides of the tamper-proof plastic bowl. ‘Why does it matter?’ He’s acting indifferent, but his voice quavers just a little.

‘Because I did the same thing once,’ Finn says evenly. ‘Lowered my blaster and refused to kill a sanctioned target. The Order wasn’t too thrilled about it, so I’m wondering how you’re going to explain to your soldiers why you stood down in front of a whole battalion and let a bunch of rebel scum take you captive.’ He hesitates. It’s not his job, but he might as well try. ‘I mean, assuming you plan to escape this cage and get back to them at some point.’

Ren sidesteps the bait with a lightly raised eyebrow. Finn isn’t actually expecting any kind of serious answer, so it takes him by surprise when Ren puts down the ladle and meets his eyes directly through the shimmering force field between them. ‘You start,’ he says.

‘I start what?’

‘Why did _you_ refuse to shoot?’

Somehow, despite being at every possible disadvantage, he seems to think he can take the upper hand. Finn plays along. It’s definitely a strategic decision, and not at all affected by the intensity of Ren’s gaze or the eerie, commanding ring of his voice. ‘I refused because it was the right thing to do,’ he says.

‘No you didn’t,’ Ren says. His eyes are bright and wet and piercing. ‘You refused because you were frightened. The blaster bolts were flying and your friends were dying, and all you wanted was to run to a place where no one else would shoot at you any more.’ A humourless snort. ‘Taking off with the Resistance was an interesting choice on that front.’

‘I believe in the Resistance.’

‘Maybe now,’ Ren says. ‘But it took time, didn’t it? It took you a lot of time to shake off the fear.’

It’s _too_ bright, that gaze. Finn shudders and breaks eye contact, and has to resist the urge to turn his face away altogether. Ren’s not wrong – he was afraid. Of course he was fucking afraid. Leaving the First Order was the most frightening thing he ever did, but now he’s through the other side and he’s not about to let a broken mess like Ren make him feel bad about it. ‘Okay,’ he forces himself to say. ‘You’ve told me why I didn’t take my shot. Now it’s your turn.’

‘You’re a coward,’ says Ren. ‘A coward and a traitor and a shameless opportunist. You turned your back on the First Order, and for what? For nothing. A safe place to hide. A way to feel special. An excuse to–’

‘Why didn’t you take the shot, Ren?’

‘I don’t _know_ ,’ Ren snarls, pushing to his feet and upending his bowl of soup across the table.

The guards in the control room will have seen that on the holofeed. They’ll be rushing for the brig right now, blasters and batons in hand, ready to suppress Ren’s eruption by any means necessary. But when they arrive, they’ll find him slumped back in his chair staring in bleak-eyed horror at the ground beneath his feet.

He’s so close to breaking that Finn can taste it in the air. ‘Bring him another bowl of soup,’ he tells the baffled guards. ‘He’ll probably eat it now he’s blown off some steam.’

‘I’m not going in there to clean up that mess,’ says the guard whose blaster is still half cocked.

‘Then give him a mop as well,’ Finn says, projecting just loud enough that there’s no risk of Ren not hearing. ‘He’s made a lot of messes that he’ll have to clean up sooner or later – might as well get in some practice while he can.’

* * *

Three things happen in quick succession that night.

One, Finn jolts awake from a dream about red-rimmed eyes and lank black hair and a voice that trembles like leaves in a gale. He hears: _You’re a coward. A traitor._ He hears: _I don’t know_. He hears: _Help me._

Two, the perimeter alarm blares loud enough to shake the foundations of the ancient bunker. An Order ship is on the radar, moving closer. Resistance fighters rise from their beds and rush for the armory, still half-dressed and bleary.

Three, Kylo Ren breaks. It’s like a silent scream inside Finn’s head, and without seeing him or saying anything he knows – he just _knows_.

He fights his way past a stream of panicked X-wing pilots to get to the brig. It’s not the most strategic place to be, or by any obvious logic the most important, but something pulls him there. Something he knows in his gut not to question. ‘They’re here,’ says Ren before Finn is halfway through the door. He’s sitting in the same place Finn left him earlier that day. Staring at ground. Eyes wide and glazed and full of desperation. ‘They’ve come to rescue me.’

'We’ll help you,’ Finn shouts over the wailing of the alarm. ‘Fucking hell, Ren, _I’ll_ help you.’

‘You’re a coward,’ Ren tells the ground. ‘A traitor. You were afraid. You’re still afraid.’

‘I’m _afraid_ because your friends are about to blow this place to smithereens,’ Finn yells, before it hits him like a gut punch along with another shriek from the siren: Ren isn’t talking to him.

He takes a deep breath. All that battle training Ren accused him of forgetting is coming back – chaos has taken hold of the base, but his nerves are steady. ‘Listen to me. We have to evacuate before the Order gets here, which means I’m going to have to try and move you from this cell onto the ship. There’s no way I can overpower you to do that. But if I leave you here, there’s nothing to stop them from shooting us out of the sky, so I have to try anyway. If you regret not taking the shot, now’s your big chance to kill us after all.’

‘I could kill all of you,’ Ren whispers.

‘Yeah, trust me, we know. Are you going to fight me if I open up this cage?’

Ren stares at him, and Finn recognises the look on his face – it’s the same one he saw on Starkiller when he offered Ren the thermos.

One day, Force willing, he’ll get the chance to ask what Ren was crying about that day. He wouldn’t mind knowing, just for closure’s sake. He should hate this man with a burning passion. Should want to see him dead. Should want to see him suffer. But Ren just keeps on staring at the hand of mercy outstretched before him, and Finn remembers those long and agonising moments as he himself wrestled with a decision that would change the course of his future.

‘I’ll help you,’ he says again, and he means it more than he can explain. ‘You don’t have to believe, Ren. You don’t have to stop being afraid, not yet. All you have to do is refuse to take the shot.’

‘I already refused,’ Ren breathes.

‘Then I’m gonna open up this cage, and you’re gonna breathe deep and come quietly and keep up the good work not killing me.’

The control panel is on the wall beside the door. With the flick of a simple switch, the force field comes down and the cell unlocks and Kylo Ren is facing Finn with no barrier left to hold him back. He lifts his head, and rises to his feet, and in the freefall moment of silence it hits Finn that he’s banked the survival of the whole Resistance on his words being enough to end a one-man civil war that’s been raging without pause for more than thirty years.

He bates his breath, and faces Ren, and waits.

* * *

Rey emerges from the brig with a face like murder. ‘There’s no point,’ she snarls as she storms past Finn, tossing her holorecorder down on the counter. ‘He’s playing games, that’s all he’s doing. Doesn’t want to talk. Doesn’t want to cooperate. Doesn’t want to _fucking_ –’

He loses track of her diatribe as she disappears down the hallway to her bunk. It’s been three days since they narrowly escaped the First Order’s storming assault on the base where they’d been hiding. They’re in deep space now, with no help on the horizon and no way to securely contact the main Resistance fleet. Some amazing courage from their crew, and some very clever shield mods from the engineers, have steered them safely off the radar. But it’s thanks to the presence of a single man on board that the Order hasn’t simply opened fire on their general coordinates and turned the whole ship into space dust.

‘He’ll talk,’ Finn tells the now-empty room. It’s touch and go at the moment, like it will be for a long time to come – Kylo Ren is still very much his angry, destructive, conflicted self. He’s nowhere near the true change of heart that will soothe his twisted rage and let the wounds begin to heal. But he’s here. He’s on board, literally if not yet figuratively.

That night after dinner, Finn heads down to the brig with a thermos of tea. Ren accepts it with hands that tremble just a little. 'Thank you,' is all he says.

Their eyes meet, and even without the Force to help him, Finn can see through Ren’s eyes like a clear open window: he remembers, too.

 


End file.
